A convicted Al-Qaeda sympathizer who conspired to kill Americans in shopping malls and traveled to the Mideast to train with the terror group is now teaching kids at a muslim community center on Staten Island.
For the past five months, Tarek Mehanna — who prosecutors say once vowed to wage armed jihad against Americans both here and abroad — has been teaching Arabic and the Quran to children as young as 4 at the Muslim Community Center of Staten Island in West Brighton.
Mohamed Bahi, a former senior advisor to Mayor Adams and the Muslim Community Center of Staten Island’s founder, announced Mehanna’s hiring in a since-deleted Facebook post, promoting the MCC’s Jan. 11 grand opening.
Adams has visited the MCC in Brooklyn in the past.
Mehanna, 43, teaches four days a week, four hours per day.
“I’m all for second chances — but not when it comes to convicted terrorists teaching kids. That’s not rehabilitation — that’s insanity,” said City Councilman Frank Morano (R-Staten Island).
The Sept. 11 attacks inspired the terror teacher and galvanized his radicalization, according to federal prosecutors. Mehanna and his unnamed co-conspirators were undeterred when denied entry into Afghanistan at the Pakistan border in 2002, and “agreed to explore ways in which they, too, could kill Americans.”
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Mehanna discussed purchasing automatic guns with his co-conspirators to murder US citizens inside shopping malls, “but [they] ultimately dismissed them as impractical,” according to prosecutors.
Their focus then shifted towards killing American soldiers, whom Mehanna called “infidels,” according to court records.
“They discussed many options,” reads the government’s 2012 sentencing memoradum, which asked a judge to send Mehanna away for life. Ultimately, they decided in 2004 to “seek training in Yemen, sought guidance on how to obtain it, received contacts, equipped and readied themselves for the journey, and made arrangements to sneak out of Massachusetts.”
After days criss-crossing Yemen’s hostile landscape, “braving brigands and once facing down an AK-47,” the group failed to “find a suitable training camp” and “Mehanna returned to the United States disappointed but no less determined to provide support to America’s enemies.”
The one-time pharmacist worked in an upscale Boston suburb. He attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan later in 2004, where he received “paramilitary training so that he could eventually join Al-Qaeda in Iraq in fighting and killing American soldiers,” prosecutors said.
Mehanna spent the last 14 years at the federal pen in Florence, CO, after being convicted in 2011 of providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit murder, and making false statements to the FBI.
Mehanna lied about his Yemeni trip when questioned by federal agents, and later translated jihadist propaganda and distributed it online, along with Al-Qaeda recruitment videos, officials said.
Prosecutors further stated Mehanna, whose best friend was Islamist extremist Daniel Joseph Maldonado, “enjoyed viewing” and immersing himself in footage of the beheadings of Pennsylvania contractor Nick Berg, New Jersey contractor Paul Johnson, and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
He showed the horrific videos during “movie nights” he hosted, according to prosecutors, who said Mehanna idolized Iraqi terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who killed Berg.
“He prolifically distributed a video of the mutilation of American soldiers in Iraq, described how one could see the internal organs and ribs, and then said, ‘Texas BBQ is the way to go,’” prosecutors said.
“This is the role model that kids should be looking up to?” seethed former Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind. “This is a role model? Someone desperate to become a terrorist? It’s a model of terrorism.
“We know what he stands for and what he’s about — what is he teaching these children?” asked Hikind, the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism.
While in federal custody, a treatise attributed to Mehanna was posted to a Facebook page calling for his release. In the post, he likened the entire Muslim world to the human body, and compared America to AIDS.
“Jihad is its immune system,” Mehanna wrote.
Following his release in late August, Mehanna mocked the deaths of Israeli soldiers on Facebook, writing “Poor baby” above videos he shared in both October and November.
He also ridiculed Sgt. Quandarius Davon Stanley, 23, who was killed May 23, 2024, while delivering aid to Gaza on President Biden’s failed floating pier.
“Another poor baby,” Mehanna wrote on Facebook.
In December, Mehanna translated a speech by Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden’s mentors, and shared the lecture — about Marwan Hadid, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria — in a now-deleted Facebook post.
The MCC of Staten Island, affiliated with the Muslim Community Center in Brooklyn, has only been open since mid-January, and only just filed its not-for-profit incorporation documents with the Department of State’s Division of Corporations on June 5.
The MCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s clear he still harbors the same anti-American hatred he held before his sentence,” blasted City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn). “The ‘education’ these children are receiving is being administered on American soil and should reflect the values and interests of our nation.”
Vernikov wants him removed from any position where he’ll have “any opportunity to mold young minds.”
Asked Vernikov: “Do any of us really believe that someone who was convicted for colluding with Al Qaeda — a terrorist organization that’s committed terrorist acts on American soil and shed American blood — is truly ‘reformed’ and won’t continue to collude with other terrorists, and won’t indoctrinate the children in his care into a radical jihadist ideology?”
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